


snip-snip-snickt

by foolscapper



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mentions of Pedophilia, Self-Destruction, Self-Worth Issues, an exploration kinda of charlie kelly's pov and trauma, it's way way way too seriously written for this obscene-ass show, mentions of sexual abuse, mostly hurt a little comfort, no beta i die as i live, nothing graphically shown!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:48:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29399316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolscapper/pseuds/foolscapper
Summary: Sidney looks mortified by the thought. It reminds Charlie that he's a freakazoid, and that Sidney's one of the normal ones. Frankly, that's good. That's great. She can grow up and be kinda alright, and she won't be inhaling paint thinner at three in the morning in the bar basement until she vomits, and she won't drink alone in a pub bathroom because she's a stalker and she knows it's wrong, and she won't huddle in a high school broom closet and drink bleach and hope maaaybe it kills him, or at the very least gives Mac enough fear of losing his best friend that he sleeps on the floor between Charlie's bed and the bedroom door.Nah, Sid's gonna be fine. She makes faces at eating bugs.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	snip-snip-snickt

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read my CSA-focused fanfic for Peter Parker called 'Statistically Speaking' — this is, uh... well. The polar opposite of that fanfic. It's not a particularly happy story and will talk about the influence of trauma as it follows you untreated into your adulthood. Please, PLEASE tread carefully here if this kind of topic upsets you or triggers you in any way. I'm sorry THIS my first IASIP fanfic. :^U 
> 
> (BUT YOUR HONOR, IN MY DEFENSE, IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IS REALLY DARK UNDER ALL THE GOOFS.)
> 
> And I'm sorry if it's sloppy, it was definitely a 'write until i feel done' kind of fanfic this night.
> 
> It is not beta'd, but I'll beta it later when it's not 5:30 in the morning.

"Pssst. Hey, kid. Agent Ghoul! Over here."

It's 12-something in the afternoon, and kids crawl all over the monkey bars and swings like little mites skittering across scalps. Charlie's hunkered down, a secret agent where the fence meets a fifth grade classroom, just before the wide expanse of playground rolls out. Some kid in a stained polo shirt is playing tetherball by himself, and a gaggle with detention walk the oval track, around the overgrown grass island. Charlie remembers doing that a lot. He remembers detention in-between eating glue sticks and failing to read out loud; he used to walk that track and get distracted, because time moved slower for him than the other kids, and he used to try to stomp on the bees in the grass.

Charlie's focused particularly on a girl sitting at a bench, drawing on it with a sharpie. Sidney, she's nine-ish or something, hair always in loose braids. Today she's got an ugly velvet-textured green turtleneck on, the stuff of nightmares to most people with any fashion sense. Well, Charlie happens to think highly of anyone willing to wear toxic bright green outfits.

Sidney looks over at him where he's squatting, and he urgently motions her over. He looks like a creep, forty-something with his blown-out jacket elbows and the shirt he's worn for five days straight, but he doesn't give a shit what some over-dramatic yard sentry is gonna yell if they notice him looking like he's right out of a PSA on stranger danger. Miss Pigtails looks around for those very sentries before she adjusts the sweater she's got on over the ugly turtleneck, and then makes her way over to the high-voiced alley rat. This is their new daily routine for the last two weeks, the first time she acquiesced despite the smell of sweat and sewer that had drifted off him at the time.

"You got the goods, Agent Ghoul?" he whispers urgently, and she nods. 

"As long as you got something for me, Agent Gremlin."

She unzips her jacket and out pours an assortment of art supplies — a box fulla half-broken squared chalk-somethings, crayola markers, glue bottles and the scissors with the safety handles. Charlie collects them through a gap in the fence some pervert probably tried to make. Now it's used for illicit school equipment exchanges. Worse than drug deals, here. Only Charlie's completely sober right now; the paint that scuffs his old sneakers is from a high weeks ago. He hasn't bothered cleaning them, but he'll come around.

"Hell yeah, this is awesome — artist pastries. Neat."

"Pastels," Sidney corrects, adjusting over-sized glasses. You can tell she can't see shit without them. She says for the maybe tenth time he's known her: "Mr. Gremlin, you can't read at all."

He starts stuffing the supplies into the Target bag he found outside in the pub dumpster; he left the receipt in there, too, in case he needed extra doodling paper. Glancing at her with a wrinkled nose — a wrinkled face, really, because his whole face moves like a hivemind with his nose — he grouses, "Yeah, well, you didn't know what a ghoul or a gremlin was before Monday, so don't act so high and mighty."

"Just gimme the candy, before I yell for Miss Sandra."

"Ugh, Miss _Sandra_. She still works here? The ol' bitch has gotta be a hundred-billion years old by now."

He hands her the Twix candy bars he stole from Mac's hidden toolbox, the one he hordes snacks in and never seems to notice gets emptier over the week. 

"You got detention from her a lot?" she asks.

"Oh, yeah. Like, all the time. One time she tried to pull me by the arm to the cafeteria when I didn't wanna go — " He snaps his teeth together like they're a bear trap. The clack is loud and strong. "I bit her arm and didn't let go for a whole minute. At _least_. I think she's the reason I got a wart on my arm for the longest time — because she grabbed me there."

Sidney pockets the candy and giggles stupidly at his commentary, which makes him kinda happy. Not that he cares _that_ much, because she's just his art craft dealer, but he also does care a little too much. Any time he can make someone laugh at his stupid jokes, he feels a little less like the weirdest, grossest person in the whole universe. Like he's not gonna burst apart and leave a bunch of cockroaches where he used to be.

She asks, "What're you even doing with this stuff anyway? _Don't_ just say top secret."

He almost does say just that, out of spite of someone telling him what to not say. But she's cool for being his accomplice, so he says, "I'm out of cash, and I want to do this gallery thing — at our pub. Uh, our bar.” Do kids even know what a pub is? Why is it even called a 'pub' anyway? Sounds fake, now that he thinks about it. “We did it once before and it was pretty cool. I mean, I liked it."

He knows it's kind of boring and stupid, but he got to show things there that he never showed before. Feelings and shit like that. Sidney seems completely taken by the idea, her eyes even bigger in the roundness of her glasses. He told her the first day they'd met up for their exchange that she looked like a total dork, and she'd made a miserable face, and he'd felt like shit for the rest of the day until he came back and apologized and said he was lying about all of that. Freight Train's supposed to stick together.

"If you bite someone, they usually let you go?" Sidney asks him, before he can say goodbye and put his sneakers to the pavement, rush back to his apartment with all of his little projects scattered around. Charlie absently tugs the Target bag around one arm. 

"Huh? I mean, _yeah_ , I guess. Nobody likes getting bit, Sid. You want someone off you, there's a whole lot of ways to do it. You could bark at them like a dog until they freak out and leave you alone, or you can drool on yourself until they're grossed out — maybe spit your food back out in your hand and then eat it again. I used to keep the other kids from doing anything 'cus I ate worms and spiders and shit like that."

Sidney looks mortified by the thought. It reminds Charlie that he's a freakazoid, and that Sidney's one of the normal ones. Frankly, that's good. That's _great_. She can grow up and be kinda alright, and she won't be inhaling paint thinner at three in the morning in the bar basement until she vomits, and she won't drink alone in a pub bathroom because she's a stalker and she knows it's wrong, and she won't huddle in a high school broom closet and drink bleach and hope maaaybe it kills him, or at the very least gives Mac enough fear of losing his best friend that he sleeps on the floor between Charlie's bed and the bedroom door.

Nah, Sid's gonna be fine. She makes faces at eating bugs. 

Might be a drug dealer someday if she really gets on dire straits, but Mac peddled weed in high school and always made enough for them to hit arcades, so she just needs to keep that shit on the downlow like you do your chin. That's how you make it through. 

"Are those the only ways?" she asks. "What if it's — like... a boy... trying to be gross."

Charlie stops, looks at her. Kids run all around them, pass by with just a glance — if even that — but Charlie hardly notes them as anything more than smeared colors, blurry, like the marks left in his vision after paint intoxication. Sidney looks really small. Was he that small, when he was like... whatever age she's supposed to be? Nine? Ten? He has a hard time remembering a lot of things about what he felt like; he just knows those basketball hoops on the playground looked a lot taller than they really are. 

"Whaddya' mean? You're too young for that kinda stuff. Aren't you? Or is this, uhhh, a newer generation thing? Because you don't need to get boyfriends or anything weird like that. You're, like, a foot tall. Boyfriends are a no. Or girlfriends. Is your generation still into faking being straight and stuff like that?"

Sidney shakes her head, flicking her braided pigtails over her shoulder.

"Stupid," she mutters, "No, it's not like that. I just wanna know if that kinda stuff will keep boys from trying to kiss you. Or — or touch you. Things like that. I just don't want them to be gross. Like how adults are."

Charlie nods, rubbing his bearded chin. Yeah, well, adults are freaks. At some point, people become adults, and they're immediately gonna go to hell; he's pretty sure he's not getting anywhere good when he croaks. He'll fit in downstairs. They smell like rotten eggs, too. "Okay, well... uh. Yeah. Okay!" He slaps his hands together, and points with two sure fingers. "Here's what you do: Anyone makes a move on you any time — like, _anyone_ , anywhere, and you just start _pissing_ and _shitting_."

"Peeing and pooping," Sid replies, turning pink in the face.

" _Exactly_ , yeah. PG-13, got it, okay. But yeah. Peeing and pooping. And spitting and puking. And if a grown-ass dude tries to touch you in a gross kinda way like that, you crap in your hand and you throw it right in his stupid face, okay. You just fling it like full monkey-mode, or you cram your finger in your throat and you just blast him like you're a fire hose and he's a fire."

"That's so _sick_ ," Agent Ghoul says, exasperatedly and with great disgust, with her hands over her stomach in a comical lurch.

"Trust me, I know from experience," Agent Gremlin says firmly, "It works like a charm."

And if Charlie still pisses the bed these days out of sheer routine, it's nothing anyone else gets to care about.

Being a gross little boy worked for him. Little girls should have the same luxury.

Whatever it takes to keep the spiders out of Sidney's hair, too.

* * *

A week later, he meets Sidney to exchange paper and a bundle of colored pencils for a big bag of sour patch kids. She's already at the gate before he is, her fingers curled so hard through the chain-link that they've gone white, like a skeleton that had died standing straight up. Charlie wanders up and is nearly startled by her, like she's a lady in white, only she's this little creature in an ugly pink and purple jacket with glossy stars and saturns on the front. Her glasses make her eyes look more big and more scared.

"It worked," she told him urgently, her voice hushed. "I did what you said, and it didn't happen. He was grossed out. It worked. But now he's mad at me, agent."

"Sidney," he says, "What happened to your hair?"

It's butch-short, almost. The kinda hairstyle Dennis would be disgruntled by.

"I cut it off. I cut it all off," she says. Her fingers stay clamped around the fence, but they flex at the memory of the scissors in her hands, of the _snip-snip-snickt_ as two perfectly symmetrical braids were amputated. She's crying big fat tears, and the metallic-sounding shudder of the gate under her desperate grip makes his chest feel like a hurricane is squeezing through his big fat arteries. Like they're windows, and the storm is squeezing through them and into the corridors, howling and loud in his ears. He's never been good at helping people when they cry; it reminds him of times he's cried, and he doesn't do so good at that. It's not like a Reynolds thing, where he can't understand. It's a Charlie thing, where he understands too much.

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out, because he's lost.

"My dad always says he loves my hair," she says, "I cut it off, and I pee the bed, and it _works_ , Charlie. It works, just like you said. But he gets _mad_ , too."

Charlie's mouth goes dry.

That ancient yard-duty hag, Sandra, she finally notices the weird dirty ratman at the gate with a child, and she yells for him to leave and pulls Sid away. Charlie can't see them anymore, pacing away down the sidewalk, but he's sure that the old bitch's liver-spotted hand easily encircles Sidney's bruised wrist, and for a moment he wishes he could bite down on her stupid saggy arm until she let the kid loose, because the worst fucking thing you can do to a kid who cries like _that_ is grab onto them like they'll never be allowed to be let go again.

He ends up in the basement of the pub that night, and like a rotten plant, he sucks in the chemicals and converts it to dopamine. 

"I'll fucking kill him," Charlie mutters, like he did when he was fifteen and alone with the fumes, "I'll fucking kill him, that fucking fuck. I'll smack him to little pieces."

(He never did kill anybody, and he never really meant it anyway like he should've.)

Dee finds him down there, his eyes glassy and his hair askew, and asks him with all the hesitation in the world, if he figured out how to fix a leaky beer tap. 

How would she even know to ask about anything? 

This is just how he is.

The feral little thing sitting in the dark.

* * *

He's gotten really good at stalking. He doesn't do it no more, but he's good at it.

Now he figures he can try to use it for something a little better.

Sidney's mom works nights. 

That's the problem.

Sidney's mom works nights, she doesn't have an uncle, but she has a dad. 

It's the ultimate slap in the face, as far as a fatherless bastard is concerned. It taints everything he ever dreamed for as a kid. Selfishly, he thinks how many times he wished he had a father who'd swoop in and protect him, like a kangaroo does its baby, in one of those little pouches. Unselfishly, he thinks maybe he can pretend he's a kangaroo mom for once in his goddamn life.

Frank wants to know what's up, but what's he supposed to say?

_'Dude, I think the kid I get crayons from is being molested?'_

He struggles to type crucial questions into his phone's search engine:

_**HOW LONG TAKE HARE GRO BAK?**_

* * *

The figure of a man rises out of his bed — one o'clock, and the wife's out. The kid is sleeping upstairs. Or maybe she isn't. Maybe she's staring at the cracked door of her little girly room, arms clutching something soft for comfort. Charlie's favorite thing to squeeze was the Stretch Armstrong Mac gave him for Christmas the first year they became best buddies; sometime in the sixth grade, that stupid doll broke like him, and Charlie consumed all the stuff inside.

The man's about to cross the living room toward the stairs, toward his daughter's room, but then he stops. A dark figure sits in a chair, right in front of the big bad stairway, blocking that sinister shape completely. 

"What the-" the dad starts to say. Charlie just reaches over, tugs on the on/off string of a lamp by the front door; the light makes a yellow corolla halo around Charlie's gold-painted nose, the stench of addiction wafting off him, soiling the small space with his presence. His eyes are purpled underneath and his skin is clammy, pale. His pupils are full but still feel sharp like daggers as he stares up from under messy bangs. He politely laces his fingers together, and lets them sit in his awkwardly hunched lap.

"Hello there," he says, like a Bond Villain, "Mr. Nightman. We meet again."

"Who the **_fuck_ **are you?!"

Charlie hums, looking around the small townhome with a dazed, almost docile way about him.

"I'm no Dayman," he slurs. "I'm a agent, though. M'a special kind of agent. Agents look after their dealers."

The Nightman yells in a way Jack never did. He yells, "I'm calling the cops! Did you hear me?! Get out of my house, you prick!" Charlie hears the g-sharp in his head from Paddy's basement; its draws itself out like the tinnitus in a deafened soldier's ear. The sound cloys his hearing until he can't make out anything else, but he can see the Nightman's lips moving — and the frightening slits he has for pupils. He mutters, "I'm an agent," but he hears nothing of what has left his own lips. Then he's up on his feet, with the chair toppling back behind him on a border of rug and tile. He's running the shortest marathon, he's _lunging_ , and his teeth find skin, just over a deranged pulse. If he chewed like a rat chews through the drywall, maybe he could find a vein in the Nightman's neck.

Someone screams, a shrill, girlish scream.

Sidney's at the top of the staircase watching the struggle, and she hasn't made a peep.

Her pussy-ass father, though, his voice is high enough to shatter glass.

And his hands are embarrassingly _small_ , as if that's just a common trait of a kiddy diddler.

* * *

"Charlie? Jesus _Christ_ , **_Charlie_**."

Mac stands with his hands in his back pockets, looking down at him beneath an amber street light. Charlie couldn't honestly remember the last time Mac had said his name so timidly, so carefully, like it was the kind of name someone had sent through a woodchipper and needed to be pieced back together. The nighttime is still ever-stretching, but he's pretty sure that hours have gone by now, since he'd left that guy who pretended to be a dad writhing on a living room floor. He's not embarrassed. He's not angry. He's not happy. He's not much of anything, right now.

He sits with his back to the gate of the elementary school, his elbows perched on skin that spies through torn jeans. His hands are sticky and dark, and he's got red smeared all over his mouth as if he were a zombie brought back from a long, hard fall. Mac is careful to approach him. He hunkers down with his knees creaking, because they're not in their 20's anymore, and he slowly reaches out to put his hand on Charlie's arm. He's not sure when he lost his jacket and ended up in a bloody t-shirt instead, but he feels his awareness stir again. Mac's fingers press firmly over the little blue button in the crease of his arm; that spot where the vein thumps with considerable pronunciation.

"We've been looking all over for you. Frank said you were acting really, really weird, and now there's cop cars, and someone said something about a weird guy screaming and trying to tear out someone's jugular," Mac rambles. He stops, bites his lip, looks around for any signs of blue or red lights bouncing off windows and streetlamps. "... Buddy, we gotta get you out of here. C'mon. Come stay with me and Dennis for the night. Okay?"

Charlie blinks. He looks at Mac and his stupidly sincere face. The blood around his mouth is tacky and air-dried, and doesn't seem to want to come off when Mac thumbs at it. He tries to think of something funny to say to his best friend, because he's the hilarious dirtgrub who loves spiders and ate them regardless.

"Mac," he mumbles. "Never should've dealt candy to kids. I hate kids."

He doesn't, really. 

"Ooookay, man," Mac sighs, and Charlie thinks maybe he'll try to play this off by reminding him a toilet needs fixing, or that he needs to stop being such a pussy, or that he doesn't make any sense. But instead he just leans in and wraps his arms around Charlie, and Charlie? He leans in and embraces the closest thing he'll ever get to a Dayman at age 45. Mac's a lot more sharp-angled and firm than the softer-bodied teenager that would calm him from his spiraling freneticism, but he's warm and he smells like him, and it's always just worked. 

"He messes around with his own daughter, Mac," he slurs. The drugs and booze are still wreaking havoc on his insides; he's impenetrable, though, and nothing can kill him now. "She's jus'a kid, man. She's not even old enough to deal real drugs, y'know? Maybe weed, but I don' think so. And she's got those little ghoul teeth, wasn't good for biting back yet, so I bit for her. But she's not gonna be normal, Mac. She's gonna be screwed up, too. She's gonna be screwed up like _me_. Fuck, man. Fuck. _Fuck_!"

Mac says _shhh_ , as if Charlie's crying and needs pacifying.

(Is he? He's not sure, his face feels tingly, and his brain's a million miles away from him.)

"It's okay," he whispers into Charlie's ear, "Hey, hey — It's okay, buddy. It's okay."

Mac drags him up to his feet and coaxes him into the back of Dennis' car, and he explains as much as his muddled brain will allow, in fragmented sentences. Mac makes sure to keep his friend's head down in his lap, just in case anyone's looking for a deranged man covered in someone else's blood. As Charlie fades in and out of sleep or unconsciousness or some other same-thing-different-word, Dennis tells Charlie with confidence:

"Well, _I'm_ proud of you. Frankly, it's a shame you didn't actually kill him." A pregnant pause, as the vehicle stills at a red light. "Just — don't get anything on the seats, okay? I washed them yesterday."

Charlie's eyelashes flutter with a bit more weight now, and he drifts off to the sound of Dennis asking _'Is the kid alright?'_ , and he knows he's not talking about Sidney, but Charlie thinks about her now to make up for it. He sees the kid in some weird place in his head, where images congeal into incoherent dreams. In one, he applies glue to the ends of her limp pigtails with carefulness and gingerly tries to press them back into the soft, short patches of hair behind her ears while she sits on a stool. She swirls around a nearly empty tin of paint thinner in her hands, and Charlie snatches it away from her small and shaky grasp.

The kid says to him with carefully practiced, carefully orchestrated confidence: 

"No, _no_ , he never molested me. I dodged him. I dodged him."


End file.
